Not only do you get to touch the hemline of Blake Lively thus acquiring a sprinkling of her faeriedust that will make you younger, more beautiful and generally transform your otherwise pedestrian life of quiet desperation into celebrity heaven, but you also get to read cock like this

The bones of old New York get a new lease on life in these Dutch-style bicycle crates. Built to last a lifetime from reclaimed local wood sealed with natural tung oil, each beautiful Brooklyn-made piece is imbued with its own unique character. Caboose it onto your bike to carry the day’s produce, impromptu flowers for your sweetheart, or whatever you need to transport in a stylish manner—emission-free!

Ninety-Five flippin’ dollars – that’s fifty-six of your Earth Pounds. For something with massive great slats that will spew your designer shit out all over the highway if you actually did stick it on a bike, which is why people in Amsterdam use bike baskets made of mesh so all their crap doesn’t fall out, particularly when they ride over the cobbles. Not only that but bitter experience has taught me that you stick your flippin’ uprights on the inside of the slats so you can get enough screw into the damn things else you’ll have a kit of parts again in no time at all. Years ago I made some VHS tape holders along these lines inspired by the ones in Sex Lies and Videotape where I forgot this, or else got to learn it for the first time 😉

It’s time to throw in the towel on the you can become free through not spending all your wages buying shit meme. The opposition forces are too strong when people bankroll this sort of cobblers. Decadence has set in too deeply. The economy is shattered, fewer and fewer people will earn enough to fulfil their modest aims in life, and yet the froth rises and spreads over the surface to cover the roiling darkness. The fight is futile, the bad guys won, the battle is lost. The centre cannot hold; the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. All hail to the God of Shopping, our new overlords.

Won’t someone send out the search party to find and scoop up all the brains that have fallen out all over New York City so at least they can be given a decent burial rather than feeding the dogs? And please, please, let Preserve go bust quickly to restore my erstwhile belief that I don’t share a planet with too many fools ready to be parted from their money…

“..stick your flippin’ uprights on the inside of the slats so you can get enough screw into the damn things..”

Can you elaborate please? Not that I’m going to build my own version and put Blake out of business by selling them at just under $90, I’m just curious as to why it matters, if the total thickness of wood is the same either way?

@Neverland Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. I have absolutely NO idea, and I don’t want to know!

@all – I had fun with this! I don’t hold anything personally against Blake Lively, and no, I’ve never seen a movie with her in. But she sprinkled a little bit of faeriedust over this post – nice to be able to put a picture that’s a bit less dour than charts on a PF site 🙂

@JAL – please don’t take it as gospel because I am self-taught, but typically you make your risers out of square-section wood so they’re thicker than the slats. The forces in a container push out, because we never have a container big enough for all our Stuff. Having your risers on the inside means you can get more screw thread in so it holds better. You also get more internal volume if you have more than one container side by side.

Either that or there is a general principle of carpentry I’m still blissfully unaware of…

Risers on the outside would allow the stuff crammed inside to hold the sides in place. Risers on the inside puts more stress on the joint when you’re shoving things into the box, giving the fasteners an opportunity to pop through the wood.

@Ermine – Thanks for elaborating. I’ve recently discovered and am starting to set free a practical side of myself that has been hiding since I was about 12 so I’m thirsty for any useful tit bits!
George makes a good case for risers on the outside though.. 😉

@JAL I think George is probably a better worker than I and uses something else to hold the corners together, where I slum it with a piece of square section wood to act as risers and hold the corners in.

In days of yore fruit used to be distributed to supermarkets in wooden crates like these where they used a piece of arris rail (square section sawn diagonally to make triangular section) as risers at the corners. Imagine the profit margin at $95 a pop!

@Nathan – in a designer handbag maybe? Though that appears to be “somewhat last season dahlink…”

Sorry to go completely off topic to something utterly irrelevant, but I *think* I know who Blake Lively is. Mr Starla has worked in the movie industry for 20 years and tells me Blake was in a teen movie show called “Gossip Girl” and has attempted badly to be a movie actress. I’m told her acting is more wooden than her $95 crates. Someone may have had a word in her ear, hence the caboose-ing and “homemaking” products. It’s no excuse though, whoever you think you once were.

if only poor blake had put the money from whatever teen thing she was in into index funds, and learnt about frugality, she’d have no need to demean herself selling overpriced tat. it’s a cautionary tale.

[…] Unfortunately becoming more skilful and self-reliant is not the way that consumerism takes us – people are becoming less and less self-reliant even at some of the basic skills in life like cooking and basic construction. The increasing specialisation and antipathy to generalists in professional work is also running against that. You only have to look at back-issues of Popular Mechanics or Woodworking to see that previous generations were far more self-reliant. I am probably a fair way ahead of most people – I have built a fair number of odds and sods but I don’t have the solid grounding of my father’s and grandfather’s generations because I learned a lot of this from books, not from seeing people do it. I didn’t even know how to make a packing crate right. […]